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Comment by FollowingTheDao | Hacker News Reader

I agree, it is very frustrating. I will say that the reason they have not found a cause and/or cure for Alzheimer's is that it is a polygenic and polyenvironmental disease. The only way to cure Alzheimer's is to look at each person individually (personalized medicine) but that is expensive and not as profitable.

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Do you have know of any individualized Alzheimers treatments resulted in the cure, slowing down, or "stopped further damage"? That would seem like big news, even if it was only in a person or two.

So then "curing Alzheimer's" is akin to "curing cancer". If this is true, I wish this truth was better disseminated.

Is the theory now that Alzheimer's just actual brain rot, of which their are multiple causes, and that beta amyloid plaques are just detritus of a losing battle?

We have built a rather large toolset for detecting and treating a range of cancer variants over the last decades. With meaningful changes in expected outcomes. Considerable drop in mortality, for example. Far from cured though. Alzheimer's might be much trickier. ..

I’m guessing it’s trickier because it’s harder to get biopsies of the brain mid treatment. It doesn’t help that it’s been treated as one disease and assuming a single cause for so long

Some researchers think Alzheimer's is a man made disease.

The last time I read up on this it was basically that we all have some predetermined risk of developing an Alzheimer's type disease, but that modern environmental variables raise that risk to such a high likelihood that it's become something it never used to be.

Interesting to think about.

> , but that modern environmental variables raise that risk to such a high likelihood that it's become something it never used to be.

Well, yeah, because more people get old enough to get it.

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